Blimey, the cost of tyres has gone up. I had to put 4 new boots on the Subaru today - Dunlop Sport AP2's. Cost me just over 400 bux with fitting / balancing etc. For comparison, the Yokohamas I put on the old Subaru cost me about $270.

The French are at it again. It's taken bloody years to get a settlement out of Libya for the Lockerbie bombing. And right as it was about to go through, what happens? The French stall the whole process by demanding more money for another airliner bombing in 1989 - a UTA flight. France is such a nice country. It's just ruined by the French.

Yesterday's big blackout is the biggest in history. A cascading collapse in the East Erie Loop caused 35 million people to go without power and 9 nuclear power plants to go offline.

In a blinding flash of inspiration, President Bush said the blackout was a "wake-up call," and said "we need to modernize the electricity grid".

Erm.

Wasn't 9-11 the wake-up call? What the fuck has all that money in the homeland defence budget been doing for the last two years? Lining people's asses with gold? After a big shocker like 9-11, the first things you check for integrity are infrastructure - power, water and sewerage. Terrorists could nail any one of those three and bring the country to it's knees. This blackout has proved that. It's also proved that the government is still running around like headless chickens, completely clueless as to how to protect themselves. We're all getting strip-searched at airports but nobody is being creative enough to think "Hmm. What if someone set fire to a substation and caused a cascade failure."
Or "Hmm. What would happen if someone dumped botulism into Lake Powell - into the drinking water supply."
Or even "Hmm. Wouldn't we be a lot better of without a warmonger with a God complex at the helm?"

Hmm. A new video game for the GB Advance has got a solar panel in the cartridge. Apparently sensitive to only natural sunlight, it gives players of the handheld game a strategical advantage.
It's called "Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand," and it's a vampire-hunter game.
Great. So Nintendo just alienated most of England and a good portion of Europe where sunlight can't be guaranteed because of the shite weather (current heatwave notwithstanding).

Seems like they've got a power failure cascade going on. State officials said the Niagara-Mohawk power grid was overloaded. The grid provides power for New York and stretches into Canada. The officials said the outage is a natural occurrence and not related to terrorism.

Oh oh. Big power outages reported all across the northeast. Seems too much like coincidence.
Cities affected include New York; Boston, Massachusetts; Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Toronto, Ontario; and Ottawa, Ontario. The power outage occurred shortly after 4 p.m. Much of Midtown Manhattan and Wall Street were shut down, including all area airports and the Long Island Railroad. The airports were operating on back-up power and operations were reported to be normal, officials said.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Mwah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Funnee.
Microsoft today announced on their own website that they were powerless against the MSBlast worm that's bringing the world's PCs to their knees. Apparently it's not their fault though. "Home users do not actively keep up with Windows Update. Some are not even aware that it exists."
Well - if the fucking software wasn't so full of holes to start with, we wouldn't need to know about windows bloody update now would we?
One message in the worm is "billy gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software"

In other news, the New Scotsman today stated the bleeding obvious : the UK has the highest incedence of road rage in Europe. Ho hum. Only a year to go before we top the world in another crime. http://www.news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=884672003

This is pretty funny. Two big internet hitters seem to have had collective attacks of stupidity today. First, AOL Time Warner Inc. is considering dropping "AOL" from its name because of all the complaints and bad press that AOL gets.

And second, askjeeves.com has spent $6M on billboard and magazine ads that exclude the butler - Jeeves. They claim that he's not retiring — he remains prominently featured on their site. But by keeping Jeeves the butler out of the ads, they reckon consumers will visit the site to try to find him. They say that consumers are aware of the search engine, but do not visit the site.

Hmm. Well that could be because it's a crap, slow search engine bogged down with adverts.....

We went for an ace blast up the Mirror Lake Highway yesterday. About a 200 mile round trip I guess. The air was nice and cool at 10,600ft :-)
Meanwhile, England continues to swelter in the grip of a horrible heatwave. They broke the all-time record temps yesterday with 38.1°C (100.6°F in outdated money). Doesn't sound so bad to us here in America, until you remember - no air conditioning and 60% humidity. Eurch! That's gotta be shitty.